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Where Obama gets my vote

As advertising goes, Presidential campaigns are more like a Going Out of Business Sale than a Grand Opening. It’s advertising with a drop-dead finish line.

I’m a die-hard presidential ad fan. Every four years I make the minimum donation needed to get on both mailing lists. I subscribe to both blogs, follow their Twitter feeds. It’s bare-knuckles marketing to the death. I love every minute of it.

You should too because there are lessons offered daily that can apply to your advertising. Consider the 2012 election’s unfolding online dimension.Continue Reading


Be aware
Observe and reflect your market

Advertising around an event as emotionally charged as 9/11’s 10th anniversary is risky. While many companies played it safe, taking a somber approach, State Farm chose a different tone that steps past the sadness so easily associated with 9/11, reminding us of the promise in a new day.

Spike Lee’s approach to this message provides an example of number six in Ten Be’s of Better Branding: observing and reflecting the market. By infusing State Farm’s message with a positive voice, Lee captures the spirit of a city and a nation that emerged from the dust and smoke more connected to the values that make us who we are. Continue Reading

Do you buy advertising like you buy gum?

Samantha: It was an impulse purchase!
Carrie: Gum is an impulse purchase… this is more than gum!

Samantha trying to justify her cosmetic chemical peel decision
as an impulse purchase she has on Sex and The City.

Carrie has perfectly expressed the reasonable expectation of an “impulse purchase.” Much the same can be said about impulse purchases with your business’s marketing – they should be strictly reserved for stands in grocery shopping lines.

There are many scams, tricks, sneaky tactics, dodgy offers, (you get it…), out there – victims often being new businesses. “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”.

The issue you face when making an impulse purchase is that you aren’t efficiently thinking about the resulting consequences of this decision, resulting in actions that aren’t working towards the needs of your business as well as wasting a huge amount of money… You need to ask yourself every time, “Is this the highest and best use of my money?”Continue Reading

Five marketing mistakes you can’t afford

That competitor across the street is plotting to steal your customers right now. Could your marketing be making it easy for them? Typically, it’s not big things that lose customers; they’re too obvious. Costly mistakes are usually the little ones, easily overlooked in your daily buzz of doing business.

How clean are your trays?

Customers see things you don’t. Dirty tray-tables left airline passengers wondering about engine maintenance. “If they can’t get the little things right, what about the big things?” surveyed passengers told Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr. in their 1982 book, In Search of Excellence.

While some of the so-called “excellent” companies have gone by the wayside, their principles of excellence still apply. Learning from the customer, for example, helped expose these marketing mistakes:Continue Reading

Grooveyard of posts past